Why Progressive Lies Live On

We could say “progressive lies live on” in multiple areas: economics, “health science,” government. But progressives lies form the core of American history and thus the basis of the American memory.

I’m not talking about Charles Beard progressives but the twits that dominate the modern historical profession. These incestuous careerists can’t really be called “historians” any longer because their work borders on propaganda.

Leftist woke warriors gobble up their nonsense and regurgitate it in various print and online magazines and journals.

Take for example the latest “anti-Confederate” piece at The Atlantic. If CNN always has Trump on the brain, the idiots at The Atlantic still think the Confederacy exits.

This is part of the problem. Most SCV and UDC events have less than fifty people in attendance, but if you believed people like Clint Smith, there are billions of neo-Confederates roaming the landscape looking to bring back slavery and Jim Crow.

I have called the Confederate Constitution an improvement in many ways over the U.S. version. I admire men like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, and I think secession is perfectly legal. I’ve also been to more than a few SCV events.

But I don’t know anyone who pines for slavery or Jim Crow. Zero.

This is a straw man argument. More important, however, is the left’s continual tactic to “fact check” the arguments by their opponents but ignore big lies from the people they trust.

I think the subtitle of the recent Atlantic piece is both funny and a bit ironic: ” For some Americans, history isn’t the story of what actually happened; it’s the story they want to believe.”

You see, the author cites historians and other Atlantic articles that supposedly refute the hicks who think the South will rise again and who honor their Confederate ancestors, yet forgets to do the same when quoting a tour guide at a historic plantation. Why? Because the tour guide “knows” her history while the rebels at the SCV meeting are stupid enough to believe a bunch of lies.

Except that isn’t quite right. Part of the problem is the modern white liberal preoccupation with sensationalized history, and I say “white liberal” because they are the driving force behind it.

Author Clint Smith fails to “fact check” a claim that some slave mothers killed their babies rather than have them grow up in slavery. He also writes this section of the piece to make it seem like Southerners were committing genocide in the nineteenth century.

All you have to do is dust off Eugene Genovese’s 1972 work, Roll, Jordan, Roll, to see that this part of the piece is laughable at best. Yes, there are a handful of documented cases of slave mothers committing infanticide, but Genovese, who at this point was still a card carrying Marxist who had no love for the South, found it to be very rare and in fact wrote the slave children often had a better life than some of their white contemporaries, particularly those who toiled as wage slaves in Europe. He also wondered at the Southern welfare system that allowed some slave mothers what we would call maternity leave today. No contemporary white working class Europeans had this luxury.

This doesn’t mean Genovese was pro-slavery. Far from it. He often wrote about the abuse and horrors of slavery. But he went where the sources led and documented what he found. Fogel and Engerman’s Time on the Cross did the same.

Both of these books are routinely ignored by the progressive left. I have yet to see any Atlantic writers (and for that matter many young historians) seriously address Genovese or Fogel and Engerman. They can’t, but they can write stupid crap like the Atlantic piece and have modern history dorks like the Twitter historian brigade fawn all over it.

If it doesn’t fit the narrative, ignore it.

You see, progressive have their own myths that belie reality: the Righteous Cause, America is evil and built on “systemic racism,” the Founders created a “proposition nation,” etc. This is the history they “want to believe.”

Allen Guelzo, Michael Anton, and Clint Smith are birds of a feather.

And they all can fly North and stay there.

I discuss the Smith’s piece in Episode 441 of The Brion McClanahan Show.